COVID Dystopia: Bell Jars

Posted on by Thor

I animated the bell jar scene by turning the foreground person towards the camera to show he is wearing a mask. I thought I was done but when I looked at this image for the post, I found out I didn’t paint out his legs from the background layer. This makes his left leg look a bit broken. It is a subtle thing, but since I know it is there I will correct it today.

I also used ZOE Depth on the scene which allowed for a clean truck in. ZOE is however confused by glass. The people are interpreted correctly in space but the bell jars flatten out towards the background. Even stranger the round gall orbs on top of each bell jar act like spikes extending forward in space.

With the limited camera move and lack of movement up or down I was able to minimize the odd depth. The bell jars are warping a bit as well. I might redo the scene using the Black and white depth maps I already created. I will be able to move the camera more up and down and the animation will composite fine into that shot.

Every day I discover more about what works and doesn’t work with this new depth map technology. Trail and error and experimentation are my way to figure out what works for each scene.

COVID Dystopia: Mask Waste

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The animation of the turtle in this scene required some adjustment. I had the turtle open its mouth at the end as if it were going to eat the mask floating in the water. I held that drawing for just two frames. Transitions between shots all consist of fast zoom effects and in the final edit the open mouth got lost in the transition.

I decided I had to go back and make sure the open mouth held for at least six frames. Six frames is about the amount of time needed for anyone to notice something in a film. Sure enough the open mouth is now noticeable. Many of the shots in the film cut right at the moment something terrible is about to happen.

I have added about six shots with the new ZOE depth feature to the film. This new tech allows for the camera to truly truck towards the subject. I might use the feature a few more times. This turtle scene worked as it is however.

Each morning I watch the film and jot down things that could use improvement. Pam said she thinks I will be tweaking the film until I am 100. This morning I am down to five tweaks. There might be a few more but I am very close to calling the film a wrap.

This leaves me wondering what new direction I should take in 2024. I don’t think I should continue the COVID series although the pandemic is still ongoing. People will not listen since they want to believe life has returned to “normal.” That new normal comes with accepting over 1000 COVID deaths a day along with rising Long COVID Disability.

I was pleased to get an e-mail form Ambetter, my health care provider advising to get a COVID vaccine and test if sick. The saccharine photo of a mom, child and doctor had everyone in baggy blue surgical masks like those shown in this illustration. The child was shown in a useless cloth mask. There was no mention of well fitted respirators like N95 masks or social distancing. Medical messaging remains in the dark ages.

Documenting politics and the collapse of society will date my work. Forcing my way back into crowded theaters to sketch doesn’t have much appeal, since I have no desire to sit among a mask less crowd. Perhaps I can only focus on acting companies who allow me to sketch rehearsals. I remain a COVID virgin, but it takes some sacrifice to remain that way.

COVID Dystopia: Freezer Truck Morgue

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I figured the Freezer Truck Morgue would be a perfect application for the ZOE Depth I tried on several other shots. Zoe allows to the camera to truck forward. The other depth maps I have used only allow for parallax when the camera trucks side to side. So with this shot the camera trucks forward towards the prisoners who are working in the background.

One worker is tightening a strap around the midsection of the corpse and the other simply places his hand on the corpse, probably in preparation to move it, him, her. Figuring out the verb is the first step towards making the action make sense. What is seen her is the very rough animation just to get a feel for what motion will work over the 26 frames.

The first pass at the animation had far too much motion, so the action felt rushed. I had to throw out keys and simplify the action to slow it down. The feet on the one prisoner are going to be held cells which is why the feet are not drawn.

A major issue with this animation is that the prisoners are in stripped jump suits. Stripes are always a challenge to animate so the final animation will take some time to clean up.

This morning COVID Dystopia was accepted to be screened in another film festival with animated flames and confetti on Film Freeway. The proposed screening date however was in 2020 long before my film had been created. An e-mail to the film festival producer conformed that Film Freeway had simply gone rogue. The acceptance was a glitch in The Matrix.

COVID Dystopia: Rebound Animation

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I decided the rebound shot needed animation in Callipeg. As it was, I just dropped the virus into the shot and the player were held cells.Adding a depth map didn’t add much to the shot. It was boring. Do I am adding full motion to the players. The ball end up where it is in the illustration on the last frame. I need to have the ball rotate after it leaves the players hand.

The drawings for the player taking the shot are complete and today I need to add the defender who fails to block the shot. All this happens in 25 frames. I was going to export the final animation with a green screen but I might instead import all the lightning animation frames into this shot.

Painting the players should be fun with the rim light from the lightning flashes. In most of the other shots I reused painted elements to save time, but in this shot everything moves so fast that I can probably repaint every frame.

This is becoming one of my favorite shots in the film. I am glad am digging in and improved on what I had.

COVID Dystopia: Beach Walkers High Resolution

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It took me three days to get the high resolution Minotaur scene to work. I am now on day two of getting the high resolution beach walkers scene finished. The process is pretty straight forward. I keep the low resolution video on a layer in Callipeg and add high resolution changes on layers above that video. If I can live with the resolution of some elements I don’t changer them. In the case of the Minotaurs, I had to change all the line work which got very pixelated.

Callipeg has trouble playing back this hybrid scene with animated layers on top of video. The green screen video flickers off and on when I play back the animation. Thankfully despite the glitch, the Minotaur scene ultimately rendered correctly. I just have to live with the flickering nightmare and hope it renders correctly after several days of work.

In this scene I am revising all the heads and bodies and the limbs seem to be holding up without changes. I have revised the front row of zombies so far and need to finish the second row and background crowd. This is the last major scene that needs revisions. I might go through and add some more smoke effects and there are one or two scenes where I am considering animation but held off. The film just keeps evolving. With animation it is hard to know exactly when the project is finished.

COVID Dystopia: First High Res Minotaur

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Yesterday I redrew one Minotaur at high resolution to see if a full clean up animation pass might work for the scene. The idea would have been to redraw every Minotaur frame by frame. It is how the traditional Disney films were done but I decided the clean up drawing looked to stiff.

Instead of redrawing every line I am going to go through and position high resolution bodies over the green screen scene. In the frame above only the foreground Minotaur has a high resolution body in place. My plan for now is to keep positioning high res bodies over the existing footage as the figure moves back in space. My hope is that the Minotaurs that are turning the bend will be high resolution since they were not re positioned.

I will only redraw limbs that are glaringly out of focus. In this first frame the limbs of the foreground Minotaur are not very out of focus. Other Minotarus in the scene do have limbs that are out of focus. I might end up having to redraw all the limbs but for now I will see what I can get away with.

This will clearly be a multiple day job, so I better get started.

COVID Dystopia: New Flames for Canada Convoy

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I asked Pam to view the film with an eye only towards the flames and she found the flames I had in the previous COVID Convoy scene were her least favorite. This is the reworking of those flames. It involved five new layers and using all that had been learned form all the previous fire scenes.

Color is the most difficult aspect to control when there are three glow effects added to the fire. I finally learned that I could duplicate the entire flame and add a tint and hue effect to it to warn it up. I then use a multiply blend mode to blend the colors with the pre-existing flame.

She tended to like that all the fires were subtly different. I might go back and revise several of the earlier fires using what I learned along the way.

For now however I will be tackling the out of focus scenes. I looked at the Minotaur scene last night and it will involve re-animating the scene from scratch. There is no easy patch to fix the anti aliasing that caused the blur. I suspect that will be the case with zombies walking on the beach as well. These are two of the most complicated animations in the entire film and they both need to be redone at 4k.

If I remember right these scenes had so many layers that they started to have memory issues. I am not sure my computer will be able to handle the same scenes at twice the resolution. I might have to animates small groups of Minotaurs and zombies and export them is small batches to later be composited together in After Effects. I will push the program until it breaks and then start a new scenes. I’ll probably save daily versions of the scenes in case the program just seizes up.

I thought I was almost done with the film but that goal post had moved off in the distance.

COVID Film: Re-Animated at Higher Resolution

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Last night I re-animated this scene. This image is of the scene being exported from Callipeg so that I can use the animation in an After Effects composite. The important number in the stats on the export is the 3840 x 2160. That is twice the size of the first animation which was done at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Pam noticed about 5 scenes that are noticeably fuzzy. The one I dread redoing the most is the Minotaurs running up the street. There must be a dozen Minotaurs that might need to be re-worked. The scene is saved but if it is at the lower resolution, I might need to redo tons of animation. If I can get away with patching the worst offending areas and leaving the rest, I will of course do that. I will leave that scene for last to give myself plenty of time to consider the options.

Today I might tackle some Canadian flames that need to be reworked. Other scenes needing work include, fuzzy monkeys, fuzzy zombies, and a fuzzy lion. Only as I dig into each will I see how much work is involved.

COVID Film: QAnon on Fire

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When I pulled up this scene to get a screen shot for the blog, I decided to change the look of the flames based on what I learned by the time I finished the last of the flaming scenes. There are literally hundreds of settings that need to be tweaked to get just the right amount of glow and color to the flames. In the last scene I found that if I duplicated the flame layer and changed its hue to a more orange red color, I could use a multiply blend mode to add more body to the inner texture of the flames.

I had Pam look over the film last night with an eye towards the flames and any low resolution scenes that still needed work. She liked that each scene had flames that are slightly different. She did pick out one scene that she felt wasn’t as strong as the others and I will work on that scene today.

The low resolution scenes may involve some re-animating of scenes, but I am also considering just working of the faces or heads where low resolution is most obvious. All the animations are saved, so hopefully it will be easy enough to make a scene that is twice as large and rework what is most out of focus.

The problem is that when an element is rotated or moved the pixels are shuffled and anti aliasing causes a regrouping that seems out of focus. Having art with black lines makes this anti aliasing out of focus effect very obvious. Doubling the scene size doubles the number of pixels and the effect if less obvious.

Having completed the last flame scene yesterday I was thinking I was near completion. However I have more work ahead of me before I can consider the film complete.

COVID Film: Burn Liberty

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I animated the flames on these torches, for the Burn Liberty shot. In my illustration the flames were painted directly on the level of the monks. I therefor had to remove the flames from the monk layer. This meant that I needed to re-animate the monks once I had animated the flames. Both monks involved using pins to pose the monks in the extreme positions and then adding a slow out and slow in to each.

The sparks are spatters which are used throughout the film. This time I experimented with using a fractal noise pattern to add some swirling motion as the sparks rise. This didn’t work out quite as I expected. The sparks morphed shape rather than moving in a spiraling patters. It added an unexpected look and I decided to keep it.

Above each flame I added a turbulent displacement to the background to show the rising heat. This worked quite well and I started using the effect on other scenes. I only have a few more flaming scenes to animate and then I have several low resolution scenes that need fixing.